Is Chuck Nevius…
…the new Ken Garcia?
It’s bad enough that the San Francisco Chronicle and its columnist Chuck Nevius have been demonizing the homeless for months in a highly sensation and misleading fashion. But in today’s paper, they have the gall to claim — with little substantiation — that San Franciscans are no longer tolerant of the poor and now support the homeless crackdown being pushed by the Chronicle and Mayor Gavin Newsom (and let’s not forget the Examiner’s Ken Garcia, whose old anti-homeless columns for the Chron Nevius has now revived).
And when I asked Nevius about why he’s chosen the homeless for his punching bag, he said his coverage has been driven by the “400-plus” blog comments they’ve gotten complaining about the homeless. You see, he’s just giving the people what they want. As he wrote to me, “I understand that not everyone agrees, but I’ve been at this for a while, over 20 years, and my experience is that newspapers can’t create issues — no matter how we try. We can only follow them.”
Well, Chuck, I’ve been at this for almost 20 years myself, long enough to recognize bullshit when I smell it — and to understand when a newspaper is trying to play on people’s prejudices in setting the public agenda.